Women - Eastern Illinois University

preposterous to me that any reasonable person could argue otherwise.
However, pornography has always sparked heated debate.
Many differing points of view about pornography have been passionately
discussed here at EIU as a result of Dines’s presentation.
Many individuals argue that pornographers should have the right
to produce and sell porn because to restrict them would infringe
on their freedom of speech. Often, the people who make this argument
are the same people who choose not to view pornography
and are blissfully unaware of the content of many pornographic
films, magazines, and internet sites. In order to develop an informed
opinion on the subject, I believe that people need to be
exposed to the material at the heart of the discussion. Dines was
a dynamic, articulate speaker who analyzed the production and
consumption of pornography with a keen feminist sensibility. She
has her own firmly held convictions, but ultimately, she challenged
her audience to develop an informed opinion for themselves about
the consequences of pornography.
Tiffany Swiderek, student, WST 2309:
I left Gail Dines’s presentation on pornography with a whole new
outlook on something I used to blow off as “boys will be boys.”
Dines defined pornography as sexualizing abuse of women, and
drove her point home with numerous images, explanations, and
stories.
I always knew Playboy, Playpen, and Hustler were three of the
most popular “men’s” magazines. I never realized how explicit,
demeaning, and abusive Hustler magazine was towards women.
First of all, I can’t believe some of the images they print are even
legal, and second of all, I can’t imagine what kind of sick male
would actually get off looking at something so disgusting and
unrealistic.
Dines talked about abuse of women and children and how images
of pornography act as “scripts” for men to act out. . . . I left the
presentation shocked that pornography has such a huge impact
on today’s society.
Newsletter Staff
Director of Women’s Studies: Diana Slaveiro
Newsletter Editors: Ruth Hoberman and Lynanne Page
Newsletter Design: Stacia Lynch
Sace Elder, Assistant Professor, History:
It is a testament to the merits of Gail Dines’s talk that there has
been so much discussion of her presentation on campus since
March 7. Graduate students in my modern European women’s history
course, for example, spent a good hour debating the issue of
pornography and making fruitful comparisons between contemporary
debates about pornography and the late nineteenth-century
feminist debates about prostitution. Dines’s powerful images and
provocative language effectively conveyed the misogyny typical
of the porn industry. Pornography that begins with the playful
images of Playboy Playmates shades – inexorably, Dines argues
– into the much more sexually explicit and misogynist Hustler
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Dines
and finally into the graphic sexual violence of snuff films and
internet porn. Clearly the popularity of these representations of
the sexualized female body (the porn industry grosses more than
movies and video games, Dines tells us) as well as the conditions
under which many of those real women work in producing those
images reveal the persistence of male domination in our society (I
would not call it “patriarchy” as Dines does) as well as an alarming
disconnect between male and female sexuality. Pornography has
consequences not just for women but for men as well: How is it
possible, Dines asks us, for men and women to have truly intimate
and human sexual relationships when the male sexual imagination
is shaped by such violent and disturbing images?
It would be difficult to argue that the disturbing images Dines
presented were not exploitative of the women in them. In the
end, it is the production of these images and the issues of labor
that should be of the most immediate concern. The conditions
of labor that place women, in particular, at risk and the alienation
of these women from the enormous capital their labor generates
are symptomatic of a capitalist society that is and has historically
been dependent upon an abundant supply of cheap female labor.
Such was also Dines’s self-professedly Marxist critique of the porn
industry, although she spent little time discussing how these labor
issues might be addressed.
There are several aspects of the pornography problem I would
have liked to hear Dines address more adequately. When asked,
for example, if there might be an alternative eroticism that was
affirming of women and promoted human intimacy, Dines had little
to say. This issue seems to have been of particular concern to one
remarkably frank young man in the audience, who wondered how
he could imagine sex differently than how it is portrayed by the
pornographers. Dines told the young man she was sorry his sexuality
had been hijacked and that she didn’t know if he would ever
be able to reclaim it. Not very encouraging, and yet alternatives
are crucial if we hope to develop into fully realized sexual individuals.
And it seems that in the case of this young man (and many like
him) the problem isn’t just the pornography, but the sexual moralism
that combats positive and public sex education and forces
youths (primarily young boys) into the arms of pornographers to
learn what they know of sex and female bodies.
Of course, one of Dines’s main points was that young people
don’t even have to visit a porn site or watch an X-rated film to be
“educated” on exploitation. Vanity Fair, Cosmopolitan, Seventeen
– one can find violent and sexually suggestive images of women
everywhere in mainstream media. That there are certain continuities
in the representations of the female form in mainstream media
and pornography is clear (although not all of Dines’s examples
served her well in this regard). What is less clear is why this is so.
Dines seemed to suggest simultaneously that mainstream media
are mimicking the porn industry’s repertoire for financial gain,
and that both popular advertising and pornography operate in
the same cultural register that dominates and exploits women.
One of the key problems to be explained, it seems to me, is why
the sexualized body is necessarily the female body. Women’s
magazines feature images of sexy women because those are the
images that suggest to us (men and women alike) sexual desire.
In that sense, the pornographers tap into a hegemonic sexuality in
which women are the objects of desire and the sexual gaze is the
male gaze.
Perhaps to combat pornography we must not only attack the
exploitative ways in which it is produced, but also find alternative
ways of imagining, thinking about, and talking about sexual bodies.
Rich Foley, Assistant Professor, Philosophy:
“I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he
could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going
like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.” Does reading this passage
make heterosexual men desire to pluck Molly Bloom’s mountain
flower? Undoubtedly it does, and such desires affect behavior as
well. However, this uncontroversial claim is not sufficient to justify
censorship in the way that Gail Dines suggests.
Minimally, Dines requires the additional claim that the behavior
resulting from enjoying pornography will mimic the behavior depicted
by the pornography. If the aestheticization of rape changes
male behavior, but in a way that is not in fact harmful to women,
then there is no reason to censor it—abridging civil rights can be
justified only by the harm that would result if the rights were not
limited. Although most of Dines’s lecture was designed to support
this claim, I do not believe that her argument was successful.
Indeed, I think her talk was fundamentally inconsistent on this
point given her frequent and often gratuitous use of pornographic
images.
Dines argued that pornography leads men to desire depictions
of women in ever more demeaning sexual positions, and that
ultimately men prefer images of gang-rape or of women depicted
as children. Dines asserts that men will imitate these images,
resulting in violence against women and children. This mimetic
theory originates with Plato’s Republic, yet the refutation is almost
as old, and was offered by Plato’s student, Aristotle. Aristotle
argued (when faced with the violence depicted in Greek tragedy)
that graphic violence enables the audience to purge themselves of
their impure, anti-social drives. Which theory is correct is an empirical
matter, but I suspect that the societies with severe restrictions
on pornography tend to have the greatest repression and
violence against women. It is obvious that pornography affects
behavior, but if Aristotle’s theory of catharsis is correct, restriction
of pornography would lead to an increase of the very behaviors
Dines so justly condemns.
Robin Murray, Associate Professor, English:
A few years into my tenure here at Eastern, my colleague Linda
Coleman passed along a quotation from Joanne Callahan that
hangs on my office wall right beside a Georgia O’Keefe print:
“Twenty years ago, I just didn’t understand the radicals’ ideas. But
after seeing liberal feminism’s limitations, my philosophy is becoming
more radical. To my dismay, the effect of all those crucial
liberal feminist reforms was the modernization of patriarchy, not
the abolition of it,” Callahan declares.
The juxtaposition of the quotation with the print speaks well to my
reading of Gloria Steinem’s essay “Body of Knowledge” and illustrates
my discomfort with elements of the recent Gail Dines lecture
on pornography. Like Callahan, I embrace some radical feminist
philosophies, and like O’Keefe, I find the female body beautiful
and erotic—and don’t feel as if I’m objectifying myself or other
women by stating these beliefs. In “Body of Knowledge,” Steinem
articulates for a broad general audience how much of “our sense
of ourselves resides in our body.” While Steinem agrees that
women need to encourage more powerful and positive images of
women in media like film, she also recognizes the importance of
nurturing the body and recognizing its fundamental connection
with the mind. For example, she explains that “new techniques for
tracking the development of the living brain suggest that touch is
the primary source of neurochemical changes in infancy.”
For Steinem, sexuality serves as an integral element of this mindbody
connection and is an essential source for building strong
self-esteem and self-concept. According to a text on the medical
aspects of human sexuality, “Orgasm and other forms of sexual
expression are such a source of self-affirmation that two thirds of
psychiatrists believe people ‘nearly always or often’ lose self-esteem
when deprived of a ‘regular outlet for sexual gratification.’”
A long quote from Steinem will explain why I think Dines misrepresented
women’s sexuality in her talk. For Steinem, orgasm
is so central to our being that, as countless studies have shown,
masturbation is instinctive from a very early age. In later life, sexuality
and sensuality are also ways we express ourselves and ‘talk’
to each other: unlike other animals, for whom sex seems to be
focused in times of ‘heat’ or estrus when conception is most likely,
human sexual pleasure exists independently of conception, and
so is a way we communicate as well as procreate. Given gender
politics, however, men may be so genitally focused that they miss
whole-body sensuousness, while women may focus so much
Women’s Studies News April/May 2005 Apruil/May 2005 Women’s Studies News